


yesterday was hard on all of us

by caelzorah



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst, I'd Say I'm Sorry but I'm not, Oliver stays dead, a bunch of idiots dealing with grief basically, also nyssa breaks into a lot of places, felicity has a prank war with her assistant and everyone else has bloody knuckles, spoilers for 3X09
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-21
Updated: 2015-01-21
Packaged: 2018-03-08 12:23:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3209030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caelzorah/pseuds/caelzorah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nyssa brings his body home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. collision

**Author's Note:**

> This is going to be 13000 words of angst with a side of bad humour. Buckle up, friends.

Felicity gets the call at four-thirty in the morning: a silent alarm trips in the lair beneath Verdant that alerts her via cell phone. By the time she gets there Roy is pulling up on his motorcycle and John is standing by his car, gun in hand. He leads the way – cautious, checking his corners – and Roy follows carefully behind him, ready to go for his bow as soon as they’re down the stairs. So Felicity is a little confused when they reach the bottom of the stairwell and Diggle stops dead in his tracks, and Roy whirls to grab her by the shoulders and push her back – up the stairs, away.

She doesn’t understand until there is a hint of movement by her computers – black garb, black hair, black bow – and a frightening amount of stillness in the middle of the room. She doesn’t understand – until she does.

Nyssa brings his body home. Felicity wishes she hadn’t.

 

\--

 

They sit vigil by the body until mid-morning. Nyssa is long gone – John held his gun in her face and pulled back the hammer and shouted at her, eyes glistening and voice cracking, until she slunk back into the shadows from whence she came. After that they are silent, and as still as the body between them.

It doesn’t change anything: Oliver does not sit up, miraculously alive again. His chest does not rise with breath. He remains still, pale, swathed in the jacket he took with him when he left and the unzipped body bag he came home in. Starling City has never been one for small favours - let alone miracles - and it’s only fitting that Oliver Queen should remind them of that with his death the same way he did every day of his life before it.

Roy is the first to breach the quiet.

‘What do we do now?’

John has had his hand over his mouth since he sat down and he doesn’t move it now. Felicity has her glasses folded between stiff fingers – no point in wearing them with teary eyes – and she taps them against her forearm and considers the question. She doesn’t have an answer. She doesn’t know how long it takes before she can memorize the line of Oliver’s jaw and the curve of his brow. He looks calm in death, but not peaceful. She doesn’t think he had a single peaceful moment in the last six years, really. She wipes at her eyes and unfolds her glasses, and the silence drives her to her feet.

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I can’t do this. I don’t know.’

She leaves - because Oliver spent far too long chasing ghosts and Felicity won’t let him become hers.

 

\--

 

The coffee shop looks almost exactly the way it did when they first went there – before the Arrow bled in her backseat and asked her for help and she took up a second job saving lives and losing sleep. She gave him a notebook filled with secrets and invisible ink, and it felt a lot like life or death at the time but now that notebook – and everything attached to it: the Undertaking, Malcolm, Tommy, every loss they suffered since – seems like _nothing_. Back then, Oliver smiled, and lied to her face, and lived. Nothing much has changed, really, other than the end result.

She orders a coffee and takes a seat at the counter by the window. The mug warms her hands but never meets her lips. Watching strangers pass by out in the rain, it is almost easy to believe that things are as they were in the beginning. But Oliver is not here to reassure her this time, to save her from the mess she’s gotten herself into. His stool is empty. It doesn’t stay that way.

‘What do you want, Nyssa?’

‘Your ear,’ the young woman says. She has changed into something marginally less out of place than her League garb – jeans and a leather jacket that looks far too familiar to grace her shoulders. More still, she looks solemn – cowed almost – and nothing like the fiery young girl who blew through Starling City looking for her lost love and wreaking havoc when she couldn’t be found. Nyssa is a killer at heart but in this moment she just seems lost – almost apologetic. Maybe because of this – or maybe because grief has dulled the hacker's better senses – Felicity is not the least bit afraid of her.

‘I don’t owe you that,’ Felicity tells her dully, forcing her hands to stay wrapped around her mug so that her fingers will not curl into fists. ‘I don’t owe you anything.’

‘No,’ Nyssa agrees. ‘I owe you.’ Her tone is gentler than Felicity has ever heard it. She wonders if this is the voice the assassin used to charm Sara - if her accent sounded beautiful instead of threatening. Felicity feels the breath halt in her lungs, catch uncomfortably in her throat. ‘When I was younger and my father was teaching me his arts, it was not strength that he stressed, nor cunning - it was patience. I may have passed his tests over time, but I never stopped struggling with it. When I taught Sara in turn, more often than I would like to admit, she would exceed me in combat and in strategy purely due to my own reckless missteps. I am impatient by nature, and quick to anger, and slow to burn out. No matter how many times she whispered it into my skin, it never quite sunk in.’

Felicity clenches her jaw and says nothing. She has no intention of sympathising with the woman who had such an influential hand in Oliver’s death.

‘She brought out the best in me when she was here, and the worst when she was gone,’ Nyssa says after a moment, and there is a slight catch in her voice that speaks of tears, and stones in throats, and Felicity wants to put a hand on her shoulder to help her even while she wants to slap that stupid, pretty face and make her stop talking. ‘Oliver asked for time, and I wouldn’t give it to him. And when he came to offer himself up – I knew he was lying, but the things that he said… I wanted him to hurt as I was hurting. I dishonoured my love with the depth of my rage. I was impatient. I wouldn’t listen to reason. My father may have held the blade, but I am the cause of Oliver’s death.’

The blonde closes her eyes as if to block it out, grits her teeth harder and wonders how much more pressure they can take before they grind to dust in her mouth. She does not want apologies. She does not want excuses. She does not want to sympathise with Nyssa Al Ghul.

‘There was a moment,’ the assassin continues, and _god, no, she doesn’t want to hear this_ , ‘near the end. He had been so clearly outclassed. His back to the cliff, my father’s sword at his throat. And all I could think was – he told me that Sara wouldn’t have wanted the League killing innocents in her name. And I realised that she wouldn’t have wanted us killing him, either. He parried, and for a fraction of a second I had hoped that – that he could win, that my father could find defeat and stand down. And then that moment was gone, and so was he.’ The mug shakes in Felicity’s hands, a quiet rattle against the table, liquid spilling over the rim. ‘My father stabbed him, and pushed him over the ledge. I doubled back later to find the body. Sarab and I cleaned the blood from his wounds and brought him home. The League would have left him in the mountains to rot.’

‘Am I supposed to be thankful?’ Felicity finds herself saying, but doesn’t know where the fire comes from. She hasn’t felt anything since seeing the body, but now there is anger in her voice and coffee on her fingers, both overflowing. ‘Am I supposed to look at you and smile, and say that all of that is just – _okay_? “Thanks for bringing him back”? He’s a cold body on a steel table now. These aren't bygones. Do you expect a medal for having just enough decency to return his mangled corpse to the people you stole him from?’

She turns to look at Nyssa just in time to see the assassin swallow thickly and duck her head. Felicity wonders if this girl has ever seen any beauty in human life other than what Sara Lance took pains to show her. What a number her father must have done to her in youth.

‘No,’ Nyssa says stiffly. ‘I do not. There is nothing that I can do that will ever express the depth of my regret. I brought him back to you because I loved someone once, and I did not get to say goodbye. Because Oliver was a good man, and I do not understand what he died for. Because he was, even for a moment – in the midst of battle, or in the depths of your lair – if not a friend, a comrade. You all treated me amicably, when I was nothing but invasive and hostile in return. I have, to this point, repaid your kindness with nothing but grief.’

‘Returning his body is not a change from that, Nyssa,’ Felicity states.

‘Then tell me what you would have of me.’

As earnest as the request sounds, all that comes to mind is _“bring him back to life or go to hell”_. Felicity keeps her mouth shut and clutches at her half empty coffee mug until Nyssa gives up and gets up to leave.

‘At least tell me the truth,’ the assassin prompts before she goes. Felicity wonders if the brokenness in her voice is as real as it sounds, or just another practiced illusion learned from her demon father and his group of black-clad murderers.

‘Why would you think you deserve it?’ Felicity asks. ‘Why would you think I would give you anything? You’ve already taken too much.’

There is a hand on her shoulder. She doesn’t want it.

‘I need to know,’ Nyssa says. ‘I need to know what he died for. Why did he do what he did?’

‘Why did Oliver ever do anything?’ she shoots back with no small amount of bitterness. It’s hollow – like her, and John, and Roy, and this damned city. Empty, like Oliver’s body and every promise he ever made. ‘To protect the ones he loves.’

Nyssa leaves, and Felicity wonders if the assassin will put the pieces together and go after Thea, and kill Merlin. She stares into what’s left of her latte and wonders if she would feel even the slightest bit of regret if Nyssa did.

 

\--

 

When she returns to the lair, almost nothing has changed. Roy has vacated the premises but Dig sits exactly where he did four hours earlier - only now his head is in both of his hands rather than just the one. Oliver is still – well, _still_. Common sense tells her that she shouldn’t expect anything different, but some part of her still somehow imagines that she will hit the bottom step and see him sharpening arrowheads or training with Roy in the corner, or clanking his way up and down the salmon ladder just waiting to distract her from the same purpose he gave her in the first place.

Instead, he is stone cold and still on the table. He will never do those things again. And he can’t stay here.

‘What do we do with the body?’ she asks. Even as it passes her lips, she wonders when it stopped being “Oliver” and started being a corpse. How did he turn from an entity to an object in so few hours? ‘We can’t just leave him here.’

Never before now has she ever sounded so small in this place - not even in the beginning, when Oliver would loom over her and try to bully her down to size. John drops his hands ever so slowly from his face, and she realises that he has been crying. He stares at her, and she has never seen him so lost.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘What we did with Sara – his old grave? I don’t-’ He chokes off for a moment and glances beside him at the familiar stubble and the pale skin. ‘We can’t just – it’s not right. It wasn’t right then, and it’s not now. I don’t know.’ His hands shake. Felicity pulls up a chair in front of him and takes them both in her own, hoping to steady them. ‘Every lie he’s ever told has backed us into this corner. I never planned for this. We thought – if we took it seriously – this wouldn’t happen. How can no one ever know?’

‘The Arrow is going to disappear,’ Felicity says quietly, ‘Oliver Queen doesn’t have to.’

 

\--

 

They call in the Lances.

Quentin seems amazed – and flighty – to finally be in the home base of his greatest foe and biggest asset, but he stops when he sets eyes on the body in the centre of the room. Laurel moves immediately to the table and strokes Oliver’s hair, and cries. One more on a long list of losses.

‘He was the Arrow,’ Quentin says before anyone can tell him. ‘I knew. I just thought it was easier if I pretended not to.’ He watches sadly as his daughter cries, and for a moment – watching him as she is – Felicity sees another kind of sadness in him. There is so much history between the Lances and the Queens, and sometimes it is easy to forget it. Captain Lance has lost a son today - even if he was a prodigal one. ‘Like it might mean less losing him. Should have learnt better, losing Sara.’

‘When did you find out?’ Laurel asks quietly, but she doesn’t turn guilty eyes to her dad. She can’t take them off of Oliver.

‘Little things, sweetie,’ he says. ‘I’m a detective, after all. And you’re not that great a liar. I figured it out, and I pretended that it was alright, that it meant nothing - that she would come home. Just one more day of ignorance to make myself feel better. It was almost easy, since you didn’t want to talk about it. But I knew.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Laurel says, and Felicity and Diggle stay quiet and let them talk. ‘I didn’t know how to tell you.’

Quentin steps up to his daughter and turns her to face him, and tells her it’s okay. Felicity knows he means it - even if he is staring down at Oliver’s calm face over her shoulder. Eventually, they part and come back to the death at hand.

‘Why did you call us here?’ Laurel asks. ‘Other than the obvious.’

‘You were right with Sara,’ Diggle tells her solemnly. ‘It was sick. Burying him in his old grave is the easy option. But I don’t know that I can.’

There is a long silence, and Felicity is waiting for some kind of indignation – something about an old grave being good enough for Sara, but not for Oliver – but it never comes. Laurel just turns back to the body of her ex-lover and old friend and examines his face with soft eyes while her father thinks.

‘It’s different anyway,’ the Captain says. ‘Sara was my little girl, but she was also a nobody. Oliver came back to town with headlines and TV news reports. He’s not filthy rich anymore, but if he just goes missing, people are gonna notice.’ He pauses again. ‘I know some guys. But it won’t be pretty.’

Felicity vows to hack into public records and give Sara a real death certificate. It’s not enough – it never will be – but acknowledging that Sara is dead is the first real step to honouring her. There have been too many lies to keep that one going.

 

\--

 

It hits headlines the next day: “Oliver Queen found dead in suspected mugging”. The details are sparse. It’s a fake crime scene and a crew of cops Lance trusts not to look too hard, some hush-hush bank transfers and a couple of doctored reports. Once, months ago now, Felicity hacked into the SCPD’s network in order to destroy a blood sample and now she uses the same backdoor to steal the coroner’s report and replace it with something more superficial. The Captain tries to keep the gritty bits and pieces from the media. He and Laurel tamp down on every potential leak, every legal loophole.

There’s one problem: no one tells Thea.

She finds out when one particularly oblivious detective comes to give her the news at Verdant in the morning. Felicity and Roy watch on the cameras in the lair as she shatters glass bottles and upends three tables and tosses a chair through the front door after the detective as he leaves. Her first call is to Laurel and it does not go well. She is fuming, hurt. She wants to know what happened – what _really_ happened – and what is being done to find whoever killed her brother. She wants a team of detectives, forensics, and an autopsy done by an expert contractor. Everyone else knows that would be bad. Extra publicity and close scrutiny are not things that they need right now.

Laurel stonewalls her, and tells Felicity as much over the phone ten minutes later, when Roy is upstairs with his arms around his ex-girlfriend and his mouth shut.

‘I can put it off, but as long as Thea chases it up it’s a serious possibility,’ Laurel says. ‘As the last living relative, it’s ultimately up to her. You need to find a way to stop her. I don’t know what you’re going to have to tell her for that.’

‘The truth,’ Felicity says.

Oliver’s phone is on the table where his body used to be – the only thing left, since his wallet and his keys have been taken to plant on whatever thief next turns up dead in the Glades from an overdose, or a shootout, or an accident. They’re not proud of framing someone innocent of the crime, but it’s the cleanest way to do things – and besides, Oliver was all about doing the wrong things for the right reasons.

The phone’s screen is cracked – a chip in the corner and three long lines webbing out from it across the surface, purely cosmetic. Felicity doesn’t know what caused it, and doesn’t want to; she had an “I love you” and a kiss on the forehead, and that was the last she knew of Oliver Queen – those few hours before his death belong to someone else.

She picks it up, and it only takes her seconds to guess his PIN. The video is still there – an anonymous message in his inbox. Arrow after arrow into a body Felicity once sat beside in bars, and diners, and this damned lair. Thea’s face looks empty when she turns away, and something in Felicity sparks and burns at the sight. It’s not fair for this girl to be so casually unaware of the pain that she has inflicted.

‘And you deserve the truth, too,’ she says to Laurel, pressing her own phone to her ear. ‘We were wrong. Malcolm Merlyn is responsible for Sara’s death. He just had somebody else draw the bow.’

Laurel says she needs to think and hangs up with a quiet “thank you”, and Felicity sets about cleaning up the lair around her. There isn’t much to do. Soon enough the tables are clean, every arrow is in its rightful place, and both of the costumes are pristine in their cases. She shuts down the computers, turns out the lights, and – with one last cursory glance – she leaves.

Oliver brought her into the lair to save his life. She failed, so there’s no point in staying there.


	2. disorientation

Barry calls before midday.

‘I just heard,’ he starts. ‘Do you need me-’

‘ _Us_ ,’ comes Caitlin’s sharp correction in the background.

‘-us,’ Barry says. Felicity can imagine him waving his hand at his friends to quiet them, the turn of his lip, the sadness in his eyes. ‘Do you need us to – I don’t know. I don’t know what we can do, but – anything you need, Felicity. You know we’re here, right? For you. All of you.’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘We all do.’

She tells him to deal with his own city, though, because he already admitted he doesn’t know what he can do to help her, and the truth is she doesn’t either.

 

\--

 

Laurel makes it another day before fully handing over the reigns. They meet for coffee a block away from the DA’s office, and Felicity sips at her latte while Laurel tells her about Thea’s persistence.

‘In all honesty, dad did the best he could, but our story is paper-thin. The media has come up with a hundred crazy theories to cover it – which works out just fine for us, because it means no one is looking closely. But if Thea vies for further scrutiny-’ The both of them stare at her phone as it buzzes on the table between them, Thea’s name lighting up the caller ID. It hasn’t stopped for anything other than redials for almost five minutes. ‘-It's not going to hold up. The sooner she signs the release for the body, the better. But she’s insistent. She’s been waiting on me because she trusts me, and she doesn’t know what she’s doing. But she’s almost at the end of her rope. Whatever you’re planning to tell her, it’s got to be today.’

Felicity finds her way to Verdant in the late afternoon. The staff are busy setting up for the evening and none of them are particularly receptive. Roy materialises before she can even ask for him and leads her inside. He has the ghost of a black eye and the slightest hint of a limp, and Felicity knows immediately without asking that he has been spending his nights hunting down low level thugs and beating them to a pulp in dark alleyways. She doesn’t mention it.

Roy seems anxious when she asks to speak to Thea, but directs her up to the girl’s office anyway. He doesn’t bother knocking.

They are immediately accosted by the sound of Thea’s rage. Felicity hasn’t even had to deal with it thus far, but it’s obvious: Thea is too much like her brother – quick to anger, and slow to grieve. She wants vengeance more than she wants answers. Felicity is not sure if it is sympathy or anger that drives her want for the girl to stop before she truly begins. Thea is standing behind her desk when they walk in, working up momentum.

‘-don’t care if she’s busy, you will put Laurel Lance on the line right this second. I am a close friend and she knows that this takes priority so-’ She nearly doesn’t stop when her eyes fall on Felicity. Nearly. ‘Tell her to call me back as soon as she’s capable.’ She almost slams her phone down on the desk behind her. ‘What do you want?’

Roy hovers by Felicity’s shoulder until she glances at him and gestures to the door. He seems hesitant and more than a little curious, but after a moment he leaves. Felicity is glad – she knows he won’t, even for a second, approve of what she is about to do.

‘I want you to release your brother’s body,’ Felicity says as soon as the door is closed. She watches the young girl’s eyes widen and counts down to the explosion. She should know better, because it never comes. Pointed, seething words are apparently a family specialty.

‘What makes you think you have the right?’ Thea asks. ‘This has nothing to do with you. You’re just some receptionist he was doing on the side.’

Felicity can’t even find it in herself to be mad. If anything, it saddens her that this girl knows her brother so little.

‘I probably have more right to ask this of you than you realise,’ she says simply. ‘And it would be far, far easier for everyone – including you – if you would just agree with me now. Oliver died for what I’m sure he would classify as a good reason. An investigation isn’t going to bring you anything but heartache, Thea.’

‘Oh, because you’re the expert?’ It’s snide. Everything about her is snide. So this is how Thea Queen handles grief. ‘I need to know how he died. I need to know why.’

‘And you think an autopsy will tell you that?’

There is nothing but certainty in the club owner’s eyes. She has her heart set on knowing the truth, and Felicity knows now, without a doubt, that in the end Thea will find it. The only question is whether or not she will drag her brother’s name through the dirt to do so.

Felicity sighs and reaches into her bag. She pulls out a manila folder, walks forward and drops it on Thea’s desk. Thea stares at it dully, as if tempered by the thud it makes when it hits the table.

‘You weren’t satisfied with the coroner’s report because it was doctored,’ Felicity tells her evenly. ‘It wasn’t a mugging. Your brother was stabbed twice with a sword – first in the abdomen, then through the chest. The latter was a precise, and ultimately lethal strike, but not kind enough to kill him with immediacy. It punctured a lung. He would have begun to cough up his own blood right as the blade was pulled from his flesh.’ She watches as Thea pales, and feels her own stomach roil. ‘Then he fell – or was pushed, probably – from a height of roughly forty feet, resulting in multiple breaks and several fractures - including his skull. Whether it was the fall or the blood filling his lungs that actually killed him is ultimately up to interpretation.’

‘How do you - know - why are-’ Thea stutters. ‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘Because you want to know the truth,’ Felicity says. ‘I can’t imagine why. You come from a family of people who’ve lied for a living. You’re very clearly aware that the truth is often a much harder sell.’

Oliver will hate her for this. _Would_ hate her, were he not dead of his own stupid, selfless volition. But then, Oliver never could see clearly when it came to the people he loved.

Felicity is tired of lying.

‘Your brother was the Arrow,’ she says, and watches as Thea’s eyes bulge and fists clench. ‘Everyone knew but you. And if you decide to drag his body and every truth connected to it in front of a parade of detectives, and judges, and journalists, you will expose him and everyone who ever helped him. And you will destroy his name – both as the Arrow and as Oliver Queen, because they can exist separately but never together – as well as everything he stood for.’

‘I want justice,’ Thea forces out. ‘I want to see the people responsible pay for their crimes. I will not give up on it, regardless of the cost.’

Felicity purses her lips. She’s just like him.

‘Fine,’ she says. ‘Then I guess you should probably have all the facts.’ She swallows thickly and tries to remember what she planned. ‘Sara Lance is dead. You know this. Laurel told you.’

‘What does she have to do with this?’

‘Everything,’ Felicity breathes. ‘After the boat went down in the Pacific, she found her way to Nanda Parbat.’ She glimpses recognition and almost breathes relief. Malcolm Merlyn has done nothing useful in life other than warn his daughter of foreign monsters. ‘I’m assuming Malcolm told you about that. The League of Assassins. They trained Sara, and eventually she decided that instead of killing people with the talents they taught her, she would save them instead. So she came home.’ There’s been distance from Sara. Not enough. Her throat constricts. She forces words past it. ‘But she was still a member of the League when she was murdered. Vengeance is apparently part of their signing bonus.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘The League demanded that we bring the killer to them, and when we wouldn’t they threatened to massacre innocent civilians by the day. So of course, your stupid, heroic brother admitted to killing Sara.’ It’s more painful to say than she expects. ‘He demanded trial by combat. He lost.’

‘But he didn’t kill Sara,’ Thea stutters out. ‘I may not have known a lot – not as much as I thought – about him, but I know _that_. He wouldn’t. He would never kill her, no matter how he spends his nights.’

‘He didn’t,’ Felicity says, reaching into her bag for the real nail in the coffin: Oliver’s phone. She unlocks it and brings up the file, slides it across the table and presses play. ‘You did.’

No matter what training she has undertaken, Thea apparently cannot stop her own hand from covering her mouth when she watches the broken screen. She shakes minutely with every arrow that embeds itself in Sara’s body. There is a choked cry in there somewhere when Thea sees herself turn around, vacant.

‘You were drugged and brainwashed. You trusted the wrong man, and Oliver paid off your debts,’ Felicity tells her as gently as she can manage. ‘Because he was your brother, and you know he’d be damned before he let anything happen to you.’

It’s not entirely Thea’s fault – blood is a powerful thing. It’s understandable that she should have wanted something to do with her father – but then, her dad is a mass murderer and she very much knew that going in. Felicity wants to excuse her for being young and impressionable – naïve. This is the sister of the man she loved. But then she remembers the walls shaking around her in the lair when Merlyn brought the Glades down, every warning Oliver ever tried to give his headstrong little sister, and Felicity feels her anger reignite. Every ounce of sympathy leaves her.

‘There’s your truth,’ she says. ‘Release his body. You already buried him.’

Felicity flees before her compassion can return to her. She passes Roy on the stairs – flurries by him with a brief shake of her head and a tight chest. She doesn’t think she’s ever left another girl in tears before. She needs to believe that Thea deserves it. The whole drive home feels fine – not freeing, but more like her emotions have been put in stasis – and it lasts all the way to her front door and into her living room. She sits on her couch and stares at her blank television screen and wonders what she is going to do with her evenings now that she’s not saving the world. Then she cries, because Oliver has left them aimless and she has said so many terrible things in his absence.

She has hacked into government databases and written viruses powerful enough to damage the world, but this is the first time in her life that she has felt like a genuinely bad person.

 

\--

 

Felicity’s new assistant (Todd) likes to watch the news while he works.

Five gunmen hold up Starling National Bank. Police respond, and it turns into a shootout. Three of the perpetrators get away with two hundred grand between them. Six people die in the crossfire.

‘The one question on everyone’s lips today,’ the presenter says, microphone held between manicured nails, ‘is where was the Arrow during all of this, and how many lives could have been saved had he intervened?’

She cuts the power cord of his television when Todd goes to lunch.

 

\--

 

Two nights later she dreams about snow and blood and wakes to a familiar shadow at the end of her bed.

‘God damn it, Nyssa.’

Making hot chocolate for an assassin in the wake of Oliver Queen’s death is not specifically the way she ever thought her life would go. But then, she never factored in Oliver at all – or the Arrow, psychos and supervillains and saving the world. It’s probably not the most unusual situation she’s ever found herself in.

‘I must admit,’ Nyssa says, awkwardly perched on a stool at Felicity’s breakfast counter. ‘I find the fact that you have not yet asked me to leave somewhat startling.’

‘It’s not too late for me to do just that,’ Felicity grumbles. Nyssa dutifully keeps her mouth shut until a mug is placed before her on the counter and Felicity takes a seat of her own. They sit in silence for the most part – Felicity still can’t think of anything she wants to say to the young assassin and Nyssa seems cautious of saying anything particularly insensitive. If anything, the silence is a nice change. Nyssa stays until they’ve both finished their drinks and Felicity’s eyes are drooping to a close, then gently directs her to return to bed and steals her way back out the window.

By morning Felicity is almost convinced the entire encounter was only a dream – until she sees the two mugs still on the counter. No one put the cocoa powder away, either. She decides not to think on it too deeply and gets ready for work. Ray has offered her time off to grieve more times than she can count, but she is eager for the distraction.

(Felicity is tired of grieving).

 

\--

 

Roy calls her on Monday.

‘The funeral is on Friday,’ he says. Felicity is making coffee in the staff room at work. Her cup overflows and she rushes to clean it up, phone pressed tightly to her ear. ‘A small ceremony out on the old plot before the burial. You’re invited, of course. She didn’t say so or anything but Thea was too scared to call you.’

Thinking back on their conversation, Felicity’s not particularly surprised.

When he hangs up, Felicity stands in the break room staring at her coffee until Ray strides past and backtracks curiously to the door. He is cautious when he asks if she is alright, and she jumps a little at the sound of his voice. Despite her frenzied effort at the time, there is still coffee pooling on the counter at the base of her mug. She tips her coffee into the sink and cleans up the mess. After another long moment of silence Ray steps into the room, takes her by the shoulders to turn her to him and tries to smile.

‘Felicity,’ he says, one of his rare moments of true perception, ‘it’s okay to not be okay.’

For about four seconds she chokes on the impulse to fire up and glare at him, to spit out harsh words and juvenile phrases: “bullshit” and “what would you know!?”. When she glances up to his kind face and his awkward, sympathetic smile, the fire dies in her throat. Ray Palmer may be pushy, and gawky, and oftentimes inappropriate in manner, but he’s not an all-around bad guy. Really, if anything he understands - she remembers him talking about his fiancé. He’s lost someone too.

Ray tells her he’s free to talk if she ever needs anything and encourages her to take the rest of the day off. Felicity agrees, but instead of going home she finds her way over to Diggle’s place. They spend the afternoon fawning over baby Sara and doing their best to avoid the elephant in the room. Lyla wanders in at eight-thirty in the evening to find the two of them sitting on the floor in the living room watching “Robin Hood: Men in Tights”, somewhere between laughter and tears. She orders them pizza, breaks out a bottle of wine and joins them. Felicity falls asleep on their couch and wakes in the morning to the smell of pancakes and the knowledge that Oliver may be gone but she is not alone.

 

\--

 

Her assistant brings in a new television. He makes sure to turn the volume up so high that she can clearly hear every single word (“red hood sighted rounding up thugs in the Glades; four bodies found in the Glades, SCPD suspect potential serial killer; Saturday’s bank robbers yet to be apprehended; Queen killer still at large”) through her closed glass door.

 

\--

 

Nyssa breaks into her house again on Tuesday night. She brings burgers. They sit silently on the couch and watch some terrible romcom on free-to-air television that causes Felicity to roll her eyes and Nyssa to glare at the screen. Felicity goes to bed early and Nyssa falls asleep on her couch (she is gone by morning). It may actually be the most absurd experience of Felicity’s life.

 

\--

 

On Thursday morning Felicity gets to work five minutes late and finds that someone has removed the bolts from the seat of her office chair. It’s sloppy work, and she figures it out long before trying to take a seat.

During his lunch break, Felicity hacks into her assistant’s phone and sets it up so that seventeen key words will automatically correct to “yippity doo dah day”. She makes it (relatively) easy to fix, because unfastening her office chair hardly even qualifies for retaliation in the first place.

(He won’t realise what she’s done for at least four days).

Barry knocks on her office door at four in the afternoon, and she clocks out early to go for coffee. He asks how she is and doesn’t expect specifics, and it’s nice to be with him – to laugh and smile and joke about things that most of her other friends don’t understand, to spend time with someone who knows about her secret life and is almost separate from it. All the while though there is a weight over them, and it feels a lot like the glare Oliver levelled at the both of them a year or so ago when they first met and flirted with the idea of flirting. Oliver Queen was Barry’s mentor, and she knows he is here today for the funeral tomorrow.

‘Cisco and Caitlin are here. They’re checking in at the hotel,’ he says once they’ve gotten coffee and caught up, and pretended for just long enough that everything is perfectly fine. ‘I could call them. Dig. We can go down to the lair, look up a few petty criminals? Those robbers from Monday are still on the run – I’m sure I could chase them down.’

He tries to sell it to her. He really does. But Oliver has been gone for two weeks and she’s not buying it. She watches a little more of the light go out in Barry’s eyes when she shakes her head.

‘We don’t do that anymore,’ she says.

Two weeks feels like a lifetime, and Barry might have super speed but Felicity want to take him by the shoulders and remind him that there are some things you can’t outrun.

They walk around the city until dinner, and meet up with Cisco and Caitlin in the restaurant of their hotel. All three of them smile, and laugh, and watch her with worried eyes until they move their morbid party to the bar and kick back a few drinks each. Barry can’t get drunk but he doesn’t stop them from enjoying themselves. Felicity drinks more than she intends to and ends up crying on Caitlin’s shoulder until she decides to give Team Flash the slip and stumble home. She takes a cab and vaguely remembers not caring when she notices it taking several wrong turns on the route home. She wakes up in her own bed in the morning to an alarm on her cell phone, two pills and a glass of water on her bedside table, and a worn leather jacket lying on top of the clothes she set out for the funeral. Wherever she ended up the night before, Nyssa clearly brought her home.

 

\--

 

John picks her up for the funeral. Lyla is dropping baby Sara off with a babysitter and meeting them there, and Laurel is going with her father, and Roy has been glued to Thea’s side – every second that he hasn’t spent trawling the streets for human punching bags, that is.

They don’t talk at first, and despite Diggle’s slow driving they get there early. She and Dig have known each other so long now and in such a way that sitting in the car in silence is actually almost comforting. If he notices that the jacket she’s wearing is one of the few that belonged to the last friend they buried, he doesn’t mention it.

It’s right, she thinks, that they did this part together. Roy and Laurel and Quentin and Barry – and every other piece of this puzzle that Oliver Queen painstakingly put together – are all important. They’ve all lost something significant, and she knows that. They’ve all been a part of something truly great. But in the beginning it was just Dig. And then it was her. They were Oliver’s team – and everyone since has been a great addition, but she and Dig were the first, were the _core_. Team Arrow started with them.

Felicity and Dig stood at Oliver’s side long before Roy picked up a bow, or Sara brought in her bo staff, or Laurel put on her sister’s jacket. It feels right for them to face this part together.

‘Are you ready for this?’ Dig asks her when more cars start pulling up and they see their friends walking across the yard. Felicity shakes her head.

‘No,’ she says thickly. ‘Not at all.’

He stands beside her and wraps an arm around her shoulders for the length of the ceremony. Laurel stands at her left and they clasp hands for the duration. The ceremony is elegant – everything from the casket to the flowers, brilliant out under the clouds, Oliver’s old grave reopened and new headstone commissioned and put in place – but it all blurs together for Felicity. Thea has chosen a decent eulogist – well-spoken and prompt. He says what he has to and gets out of the way, and then Thea gets up to speak for her brother – and Felicity cannot remember most of what the girl says but she knows “he would have done anything for me, and I wish I had known that better,” passes the girl’s lips.

There is a projector screen set up beside the casket and Thea plays a home video on it – some old clip of the Queen family before the Undertaking, the Island, the Arrow. Thea is unmarred by time and lies, and Moira is regal as ever, and Robert is smiling, and Oliver is shaggy haired and cocky and more weightless than she has ever seen him as he poses for the camera and jokes with his sister. Felicity cries for all that he lost in his years away, and for all that she has lost now with him.

Laurel’s hand parts from hers, then, and Barry takes her place. The lawyer strides up to take her place in front of the small crowd. The congregation is mostly made up of their friends, but there are still people here who did not know all of Oliver’s secrets and everything they have done thus far to keep it that way.

‘I knew Oliver Queen for most of my life,’ Laurel says. Her hair gets caught in the breeze, and Felicity watches bruised hands rise to push the strands from her face. ‘I loved him. I was not the only one who did.’ Felicity watches her hesitate and push through her tears. ‘There’s a lot you could say about Oliver. Not all of it would be good. Most of it would be true. When we were younger, he did a lot of things he wasn’t proud of. And it’s those things – his mistakes – that most people will remember him for. But they shouldn’t.’

Diggle shakes beside her, and she knows that his tears are running free while he is holding back the sobs that coincide with them – stoic as he tries to be. Lyla stands on his other side, hand in his, and Felicity watches the way her thumb rubs idly against dark skin. Barry squeezes her own.

‘The truth is,’ Laurel continues, ‘whether or not anyone else saw it, when Oliver came back from that island he came back changed. He was so much more. A better person. He surrounded himself with good people – people that he would have done _anything_ for, who would have done the same for him – and looked at the world with nothing but good intentions. And if you will remember him for anything, let it be for that: his kindness, his certainty, his loyalty, and the purpose he gave to those around him.’

Afterwards, they watch the casket as it is lowered six feet into the earth. One by one they drop a handful of dirt into the grave. When Felicity’s turn comes she pauses with the dirt in her hand, looking down at the partly covered wood, and considers saying something – “thank you,” or “I love you,” or “I miss you,” or “goodbye,” – but nothing comes out. Cool earth slips between her fingers, and she turns away. She doesn’t go to the reception.

 

\--

 

The weekend is slow. She gets a text from papa Lance that says "problem solved" and nothing else, and avoids all news outlets like the plague on her days off (someone had to take the fall for Oliver's death; she does not need to know who"). She spends most of it with Caitlin, lazing around her house and baking. It’s never really been her thing, but Caitlin equates cooking to science and makes vague mentions of wasting away her free time in recipe books in the wake of her fiancé’s death (except her fiancé isn’t dead anymore. Go figure). They marathon science fiction shows and go through a pint of icecream, and on Sunday they head into the city to shop. Barry, Cisco and Roy meet them there to get lunch. Cisco and Caitlin catch the train home that night, but Barry stays for a few more hours, walking with Felicity through the city streets and knocking shoulders with her in the cold.

He tells her about the man in the yellow suit, and Felicity musters up the tattered remains of her enthusiasm to offer him reassurance and an attempt at a new perspective. At the same time, she wonders if getting involved with vendettas and justice will end any differently just because there are metahumans involved.

When the night winds to a close Barry drops her home.

‘I didn’t know him long,’ he says when they are standing on her doorstep. ‘But he loved you. Oliver was all about his secrets, but it may have been the most obvious thing about him.’

‘I know. He told me.’ It strikes her then, watching Barry wave his hand at the front door to trigger the motion sensor and keep the light on: ‘I don’t remember saying it back.’

She is glad for the way that he pulls her into his arms if only because it means she doesn’t have to see the sympathy in his eyes. Barry is warm and solid, and still here – for now – and she clutches at his jacket but doesn’t cry.

‘He knew,’ Barry tells her. ‘Don’t ever doubt that.’ He presses the words into her hair, holds her tightly as if to encase her in the sentiment. His phone buzzes and his hand blurs to answer it – it barely seems like he lets go of her at all.

‘Duty calls,’ she mumbles into his chest.

‘I’m only a phone call away,’ he reminds her. He pauses for a moment – she wonders if it is an eternity to him – before pressing a kiss to her forehead and disconnecting. ‘Gotta run.’

Then he’s gone.

 

\--

 

Last week’s bank robbers show up in a flash of lightning in the middle of Lance’s precinct. It makes the morning news.

 

\--

 

On Monday afternoon, Todd spills coffee across an hour’s worth of paperwork. The next morning she goes in to work early and hacks into his computer. He arrives fifteen minutes late for his shift, and when he logs into his computer every keystroke causes his speakers to loudly meow. Sitting comfortably in her office, she watches through the glass as he tries (and fails) to fix the problem, and hides her smile when she sees him yank his keyboard out at the socket in frustration and storm off to look for IT support.

Throughout the rest of the day she watches as almost the entire IT department cycles through the room outside her office, one by one, none of them successful at reversing the damage. Ray Palmer personally has to fix the system (though, not before taking the time to play “Tocatta in D-minor” entirely in cat noises), and he brings Felicity a coffee when he shows up to do so, leaving it on her desk with a wink.

‘I might not trust your PA with any foodstuffs in the near future,’ he advises kindly before he leaves.

In the afternoon, when her assistant leaves (and Todd glares at her shrewdly through the glass as he goes), Felicity reaches for her phone – and for a moment it occurs to her that this is the kind of thing she should call Oliver about. For all his seriousness, he would enjoy the triviality of the conversation. He would hear her out with barely a chuckle, and interrupt her when she went too far into detail describing how she hacked the system in the first place, but he would smile and she’d hear it in his voice.

She has scrolled to his name in her contacts list before it hits her that he will never hear about her day, will never smile around monosyllabic words and hide it behind the receiver of his cell phone again. Oliver is dead.

Felicity deletes his number from her contacts. She calls Laurel instead.

They get dinner together at some Thai restaurant midway between their respective offices that neither of them has been to but that Laurel’s workmate recommended highly. They grab a booth by the window and watch cars go past on the road outside. Laurel talks about work and laughs around the single bottle of cheap beer she nurses throughout the meal when she hears about Felicity’s assistant and his faulty keyboard. Felicity pretends not to notice the lawyer’s bruised knuckles and the practiced application of cover-up on the left side of her jaw. When they’ve finished their meals and they’re contemplating paying the bill, Felicity stumbles back into dangerous territory.

‘How long do you think this is going to last?’ she asks, and Laurel purses her lips and tips her head as if to ask for clarification. ‘All of us. Talking. Looking out for each other. How long until we go our separate ways, back to the way things were, and forget any of this ever happened?’

Laurel hesitates to respond for a few moments, and Felicity can see the sadness creep back in to the brunette. The lawyer who had to lose her sister twice, lose Oliver twice. Felicity asks because Laurel has gone through this before and survived it.

‘You never just _forget_ about it,’ Laurel says carefully. ‘And things will never be the same as they were before.’

She stops for another minute, glances out the window and watches strangers wander by beneath the streetlights. Felicity glances down to where Laurel’s fingers tighten around the neck of her beer and the bruises that adorn them. Somehow, somewhere along the way, Felicity has surrounded herself exclusively with people who would rather punch inanimate objects and other people than talk about their problems – and John, who does the same thing but occasionally throws himself into fatherhood instead.

‘He made a lot of bad decisions, but always chose good people,’ the lawyer continues.

Felicity wonders if she is thinking about Tommy, and losing him – and _god_ , this girl has lost _so much_ , and Felicity can’t just disappear and leave her alone with that, now or ever. Laurel is someone she has admired, and envied, and adored over time, but it occurs to her for the first time in some time that Laurel has lost someone she loved – just like Felicity – more than once. Her closest friends are both gone, her sister – her mother has a new family in a new city without the weight of her old one. Felicity could hunker down at work running R&D for Ray Palmer, make friends and lose herself in code, and call her mother whenever she’s feeling nostalgic and Dig whenever she’s feeling sad, but Laurel has lost too much to go back to “how things were before”.

‘I think Oliver brought us all together for a reason,’ Laurel says. ‘And I don’t think that - just because he’s gone now – we all have to fall apart.’

It’s not a lot, but it speaks of experience, and of hope, and of purpose – and it’s what Felicity needs. She shouldn’t be surprised – lawyers are notoriously good at picking the right words. When they’ve paid their bill and stepped outside and are getting ready to go their separate ways, Laurel pauses again.

‘It was easier the first time,’ Laurel tells her. They are out on the sidewalk underneath the streetlights and there are fewer people around in the late evening, milling around by their cars. ‘Losing both of them. The circumstances were – well, I could hate them, instead of grieving. It seemed easier, for a really long time, to be angry. And then it just… wasn’t.’

Felicity remembers last year: lost jobs, pills, dependency, Oliver’s furrowed brow, Sara’s sad frown every time her sister was mentioned. Everything being easy until it _just wasn’t_.

‘This time – well,’ Laurel pauses to swallow, seems stuck on the words, ‘Oliver died for something he believed in. Don’t hate him for that. Don’t do that to him – but more, don’t do it to yourself.’

Laurel has been through all this before (but not quite, not really). Felicity nods like she understands and hugs Laurel goodbye. She watches the brunette get in her car and drive away, thinks about bruised knuckles and wonders who Laurel hates now if not Oliver Queen.


	3. reaffirmation

On Friday, Nyssa is sitting on her couch when Felicity gets home from work. The blonde contemplates several starters – “thanks for getting me home last week,” and “does your dad know where you are?” and “why are you still here when you have people to kill?”. She decides on none of them. Instead, Felicity takes Sara’s old jacket from where it is hanging by her door and drops it on the assassin’s lap before falling onto the couch beside her.

‘Thanks,’ she says simply. ‘It helped.’

‘You should keep it,’ Nyssa says quietly, but her hands fist in worn leather as if to belay the suggestion. ‘Sara adored you. You, and your friends – you reminded her how it felt to be human – to be loved. She would want you to have a reminder.’

Felicity sighs and shakes her head.

‘I have my memories, Nyssa,’ she replies. ‘That’s all I need.’

The assassin dutifully keeps the jacket in her own hands, but doesn’t stop clenching her fingers in the fabric. Felicity sees it as a fairly good indication that they are finally going to breach whatever subject it is that Nyssa has stuck around for.

‘Oliver’s sister killed Sara, didn’t she.’

It’s not a question. Felicity is glad – that is a truth she has already told one time too many. She nods, because there is very little else for her to say. At least the assassin isn’t flying off the handle and invoking blood debts left, right and centre.

‘I have a sister,’ Nyssa says after a moment. Felicity blinks. ‘A half-sister, really. We spent a fair deal of our youth apart, but if she were in trouble – well, I would like to think that I would assist her. I don’t really know. But I have come to learn that people do extreme things for the people that they love.’

‘You can’t kill Thea,’ Felicity cautions simply.

‘No,’ Nyssa agrees. ‘Oliver died for her. I would not seek to dishonour his sacrifice.’

Felicity just sighs and stares at her ceiling. She is not sure whether or not to feel relieved. There is a part of her – the part that turned all the lights out in the lair and decided to never return to it – that wants the witch hunt to continue. Oliver died for his sister, but he never would have had to if she’d just had the common sense not to follow Malcolm Merlyn across oceans and into bad ideas in the first place. There is something to be said about trusting mass murderers who run from their creators and fake their own deaths to avoid the consequences, and it’s something along the lines of “what the hell else were you expecting?”

And Malcolm – Oliver put an arrow through him and laid him to rest, and everything would have been fine now if the man had just _stayed dead_. Felicity has never known indignation quite like the one currently fusing down her spine. That part of her – the one that wants vengeance in the same way that Barry does for his mother and Laurel did for Tommy (reignited with Sara, with Oliver, with whoever comes next) – wins out.

‘There’s still a blood debt to be paid,’ she says, and gives up the only ghost remaining.

 

\--

 

Between children’s cartoons the next morning, Felicity texts Thea:

_Nyssa is going to kill your dad. Sorry._

She wonders if she meant that last part.

 

\--

 

Felicity wakes at four o’clock on Monday morning to the sound of something crashing in her bathroom. She grabs the bat from her bedside before she creeps, robe-clad, down the hall. Nyssa doesn’t tend to be that loud.

But then, it’s not Nyssa – it’s Roy.

He whirls to face her when she pushes the door open with a low creak, and Felicity notes his split lip and the gash through his brow, the crimson colour spidering down the side of his swollen face. He is wearing his red hoodie, and she doesn’t know how much of it has been soaked through with his own blood. There is a guilty downturn to his lip, but she wouldn’t be able to tell if she hadn’t seen it before – every time he returned to the lair after Oliver told him not to do something in the field and he had proceeded to do it anyway.

Felicity drops the bat by the bathroom doorframe and ushers him through to the living room. He limps and clutches at his ribs and she follows him with a first aid kit and takes a seat on the coffee table opposite where he drops the couch. Hydrogen peroxide and butterfly stitches fix most of the damage, and she leaves him alone for a few moments only to fetch an ice pack from the freezer – for his face or his bruised ribs, she’s not sure. When she returns he is statue-still with tears streaming down his face.

‘I’ve tried, Felicity,’ he says between silent sobs. ‘I’ve tried so hard. I can’t do this alone.’

She whispers comfort into his ear while she holds him – his face pressed into her shoulder – until the tears dry up and the sobs cease. Then Felicity finds him a pillow and blanket and sets him up on the couch. He falls asleep quickly and doesn’t wake up at all through the entirety of her morning routine an hour later. When she leaves for work Felicity makes sure to leave a glass of water and some ibuprofen on the table beside him. She doesn’t leave a note; Roy knows by now to make himself at home.

(Everyone does. Felicity's couch is quickly becoming a roadstop for wayward heroes. And Nyssa.)

The commute takes less time than Felicity expects, and she arrives with more than enough time to walk down to her favourite coffee shop and grab a latte to kick off her workday. There are three news stands along the route and every single one of them is splayed with newspapers boldly proclaiming “Glades Serial Killer Confirmed” and “Crime Rates Skyrocket in Arrow’s Absence: Where is the Hero Now?”

On the way back to the office she detours to buy an airhorn and a roll of heavy-duty duct tape. Todd is characteristically late for work that morning, so she straps it beneath his office chair.

 

\--

 

The last time Felicity worked late at Queen Consolidated she was crudely undervalued, ten floors down in the IT department and working under a supervisor. Being Vice President of Palmer Technologies hasn’t exactly been easier but she has been able to pick her own hours – they just seem to be catching up to her now. She stays late on Wednesday night to fill out paperwork and read over project proposals, and doesn’t move to leave until one o’clock in the morning. The elevator doors have opened and she is about to step in when she hears it – a muffled yelp coming from the vague direction of Ray’s office.

It presents something of a conundrum to her: she could leave and save herself the inevitable slew of trouble bound to come from investigating, or she could find out what her boss is up to and worry about the consequences later. Felicity knows the kind of people she has surrounded herself with, and the kind of things they do. Laurel bloodies her knuckles, and Roy breaks bones, and Nyssa stains any weapon she can get her hands on if it will get her even just a little closer to vengeance. Ray hides it behind a high IQ and an optimistic smile, but he is no different.

When she pushes into his office Felicity finds him gingerly pulling gauntlets from his hands. They aren’t particularly flashy – prototypes rarely are – but Felicity immediately identifies them as a part of his A.T.O.M suit.

‘What did you do?’ she asks, and he jumps at the sound of her voice.

‘Felicity!’ he shouts. She purses her lips. He has a concrete block set up on a stilts beside him, and his right hand seems strangely motionless. ‘I didn’t know you were still here!’

‘And I didn’t realise your A.T.O.M suit had moved on to unsupervised physical trials,’ she tells him dryly, frowning at the guilty turn of his lip. ‘Why were you punching cement?’

‘It was an idea, really,’ he babbles. ‘The suit ideally should possess many functions, but I’ve been particularly interested lately in the idea of increasing and reducing the mass of-’

‘Yourself, clearly, in the hopes of crushing concrete walls,’ she interrupts. Of course. She sighs and steps closer to him. ‘Show me your hand.’

He’s clearly broken something, and Felicity sighs and ushers him out of his office for the night. She drives him to the hospital, and Ray babbles in her passenger seat about Starling City, the rising crime rates, and the heroes who have abandoned it. Felicity cautions him about going it alone and he argues about the “hero Star City needs”; Felicity almost scoffs at his reckless idealism and jams on the brakes by the hospital doors.

‘If you’re going to play hero you need to understand the consequences,’ Felicity tells him.

She pauses and considers how convey that to him – what to say to make him understand: heroism is sacrifice more than it is saving the day. It is wandering the moral grey area and wondering where to draw the line. It is Tommy, impaled on a piece of rebar in a building his own father brings down; Moira, buying her children a little more time with a sword through the heart; Sara, three arrows to the chest for the gambit of a ghost. It is _acceptable losses_ , and soldiering on in spite of them. Starling City takes heroes and tears them apart, and Felicity does not believe that Ray knows what that means.

‘Oliver Queen was the Arrow.’

She thinks that the truth will be the key, that he will understand – that he will remember the weeks of grief in the aftermath of Oliver’s death and the years before it of saving the day, learning, training – the experience that still couldn’t save him. Oliver Queen was incredibly good at what he did, but Oliver Queen is dead.

‘I know,’ he says, and Felicity is not surprised. Ray is a smart man, and Oliver left more indicators of his secret identity than he intended. ‘I know what he lost, and what he left behind – I am well aware. But the fight isn’t over just because _you_ are.’

He gets out of the car, and she drives off because she will not sit idly at his side while he dreams about a better city and plans how to get there. She has had enough of healing other peoples’ hurts; someone else will set his broken bones.

(She has to fix her broken pride).

 

\--

 

By nine o’clock on Friday morning, Felicity’s office is plastered wall to wall with post-it notes of every available colour. Todd is two hours late to work, probably napping off the effort in his car. She gives him a cup of coffee when he finally shows and he eyes her suspiciously. Felicity shrugs.

‘I admire your dedication.’

She directs the cleaning crew not to touch a single note but Ray personally takes them all down over the weekend as if to apologise for Wednesday’s loose lips. Felicity puts the pranks to rest after that. So does her assistant.

 

\--

 

SCPD find their serial killer pinned to his own bedroom wall with stark black arrows, still (shockingly) very much alive.

 

\--

 

Another week passes, and Lyla calls on a Friday afternoon.

‘It’s about John,’ she says. ‘He’s been trying to help me on missions, but – I don’t know what to do with him anymore.’

Felicity directs the agent to send him in at lunch. Dig shows up looking nonplussed – if still happy to see her – with two bags of Big Belly Burger and a couple of drinks. He follows her into Oliver’s old office – hers now – and they both pretend it doesn’t feel like something’s missing.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it.

‘Lyla told me you shot a guy,’ she says between fries. John shrugs, and Felicity quirks a brow and cautiously prompts: ‘Twice in the shoulder. Once in the foot – “just for fun”?’

‘He was a bad guy,’ Dig tells her in a flat tone. She nods slowly, like she understands (she doesn’t; violence has never been her method of dealing with things). They are silent for a while, and Dig must think she’s judging him or something because it rips out of him so harshly that even he looks shocked: ‘You’re one to talk. Thea told me you sold out Malcolm Merlyn to make yourself feel better.’

They stare at each other, wide-eyed, and neither of them finishes their food. She walks him to the elevator when he decides to leaves, and he lingers by the door. Felicity wonders if he is going to apologise, and if she will deserve it if he does.

‘Do you ever miss it?’ he asks instead.

She thinks about it; sitting alone underneath the fluorescents in the lair, testing herself against firewalls and foreign systems, tracking her friends as they roam the streets. Long days and longer nights, shitty excuses born of urgency and too little sleep. Cuts and bruises – the scent of peroxide, the feeling of a needle and thread in her hands. The stone sinking in her gut that came with crashed comms, shouts, screams, crappy camera feeds – the relief when they all came home. Adrenaline. Fear. Anxiety. Loss.

‘All the time,’ she replies quietly. ‘Every day that I wake up well-rested or go home on time. Every time my phone rings and I think it’s someone else. With every newscast, every second uninterrupted. I miss it _every day_ , John.’

She sees it hit him then, and wonders what he thought before now – that she missed Oliver but not what they did together, that saving people wasn’t as important to her as it was to the rest of them, that their crusade hadn’t held her heart? But it was – it had. For most of her life Felicity had pursued a career in information technology believing it would sustain her, but then Oliver came along and showed her that there was something else – something more. She shakes her head and remembers how it felt to have purpose.

‘I miss _him_ every day.’

‘I do too.’

 

\--

 

After work she visits Oliver’s grave. His headstone reads “son, brother, hero”. Whatever Oliver really was, Felicity doesn’t think Thea quite captured it.

‘You and Sara taught me what being a hero meant,’ she says, reaching out to brush her fingers across the marble. She remembers the line of his jaw and the way that it clenched in his anger, the heavy set of his brow, the glint of his teeth when he smiled.

He was more than his stoic persona, and she remembers his rage, his desperation in the face of defeat – every loss he ever suffered, how keenly he felt them and how hard he pretended not to. His quieter moments – the gentle curve of a genuine smile, the amused glint of his eyes – adoration, and how it looked on him. She remembers the thrill of his touch and the joy she felt the first time she made him laugh, the way his kiss left her breathless and his hand on her shoulder helped her home at the end of a hard day. He was more than his worst moments, but his crusade was more than him.

‘It doesn’t feel right to do this without you,’ she whispers to stone, ‘but it feels wrong not to do it at all.’

 

\--

 

For the first time in over a month, Felicity hits the lights.

The lair is exactly how she left it – cold, clean, everything in its rightful place. The only difference is the thin layer of dust that the weeks have left behind. She sets about wiping down the tables while she waits for the others to arrive. Nyssa is first, and Felicity is not surprised. The girl has been shadowing her for the better part of the month since returning – never too far away – though Felicity still wonders why the heir to the demon has not returned home just yet.

‘Sara never liked my father’s way,’ the assassin says quietly by way of explanation. ‘I am not sure how strongly I believe in that path now, either.’

They talk about Malcolm Merlyn – fleeing for the hills with half of the League left giving chase – and Sara, and forging new paths until Dig and Roy walk cautiously down the stairs. Barry is next, zipping in with a gust of air and a short burst of lightning (if Nyssa is surprised, she doesn’t show it). It is another twenty minutes until Laurel leads Thea down the stairs, and despite her training the young girl has her heart clear on her sleeve. Felicity can’t blame her: this is her brother’s home away from home and she is finally seeing it – in his absence.

Felicity remembers her first night underneath the nightclub – blood, bandages and ripped leather, John looming over her shoulder. Urgency. There is none of that now. Thea’s introduction comes with grief and practical strangers, and is so, so different from her own.

Other than that first night, it had been a rare instance that anyone other than Oliver necessarily had to take the lead. Sure, Felicity had thrown a few directions around from the desk while the boys were out in the field – she’d even addressed Team Flash that one time in Oliver’s stead (he never could just say “thank you”). But now, with six people standing in the lair - all of them looking at her – well, this is something else.

‘I asked you all to come tonight for one very good reason – or I believe so, anyway,’ she says. ‘Most of you, whether you want to admit it or not, have not been dealing all that well with Oliver’s death. I can’t blame you. I’ve been taking it out on my personal assistant in a series of calculated and increasingly juvenile pranks.’

Her friends exchange a series of guilty glances. Felicity is unfazed.

‘I beat up, like, forty people,’ Roy offers.

‘I shot a guy,’ Diggle contests. He pauses for a moment. ‘A couple of guys.’

‘There’s one dealer I dealt with a week or so ago who may not have actually woken up yet,’ Laurel says idly, and the other two turn to look at her, stunned.

Barry stares at them all wide-eyed and doesn’t at all offer up his quick act of heroism after the funeral in rounding up the Starling National robbers and handing them off to the police. Nyssa is not so disturbed – or so modest.

‘I tracked down the Glades killer,’ she tells them all with no small amount of glee, ‘and _didn’t_ kill him.’

Felicity just stares at them all – the people Oliver brought her that she hopes never to lose – and muffles a laugh. They are a stable of rough-as-guts hero types masquerading in civilian clothes, and they are just what this city needs. A team.

‘A few weeks ago, Laurel said to me that she thought Oliver brought us all together for a reason,’ Felicity says before anyone else can contribute. ‘I knew what that was when he was here – our abilities-’ she glances at Roy, ‘-our moral fibre-’ Diggle smiles, ‘-our loyalty,’ she adds, and Nyssa bows her head. ‘He chose us because he saw something in all of us that we maybe didn’t even know existed – I know he did with me.’

She pauses and glances at his costume - pristine in its case - while she forces down the stone in her throat.

‘Oliver gave us all purpose,’ she continues, and Barry smiles. It is enough to make her forge on in spite of the flinch she knows will come from Thea when she does. ‘More than that, he gave us his trust – even when he had reason not to. I vowed not to come back down here when I knew he was gone. Too many people have died down here already, and I would not see myself added to that list.’

Ray comes to mind, with his star matter exo-suit ripped straight from science fiction, cold eyes and broken fingers in the dark and “the fight isn’t over just because you are”. His silent apology and his soft smile in the daylight. She may die down here one day, but she will not leave him and others like him to die alone above ground.

‘But I have come to believe that we have come too far to stop now,’ Felicity says. ‘Oliver may be gone, but his ideas aren't. And if you would all allow me, I would very much like to work with you now.’

Agreement is unanimous. Roy rushes to suit up, and Dig goes immediately to their cabinet of firearms to clean whichever weapons he thinks have suffered the most neglect. Laurel disappears to collect her gear and Barry blurs out of the room only to return red clad almost immediately afterwards. Nyssa takes an earpiece when it’s offered and runs, light-footed, up the stairs - off to scour for leads (she says she has them, and that woman has found too many creative ways of breaking into Felicity’s apartment for the hacker to doubt her now).

That leaves Thea.

The young Merlyn steps over cautiously and hovers a safe distance away, and Felicity struggles with a frown. It seems odd, really, that out of all of them Oliver’s sister should feel the most out of place within his space – but then, this is a secret that was kept from her for all his life.

‘You’re not right,’ the girl hazards. ‘Whoever he trusted, it wasn’t me. He never told me about any of this.’

‘He never would,’ Felicity says and shakes her head. She thinks of Oliver bleeding in her backseat, begging for help out of necessity; Roy skulking in alleyways with an ear to the ground, priming his fists for brawls, aimless; Nyssa, ever vengeful, bound to the Arrow by shared love and little else; Barry, smart and solid with technology, the best option in a bad situation. ‘Most of the people down here weren’t exactly invited in. Diggle may be the only one. Oliver didn’t want this life for anyone. It’s hard. It comes at a cost. He wanted to keep you – to keep all of us – as far from it as he could. And that wasn’t because he didn’t trust us – it was because he cared.’

‘If he had trusted me-’

‘He did, Thea,’ the hacker asserts. ‘Maybe not with his secret – but he trusted you not to run off with your father, just like he trusted your mother not to be the bad guy back when Malcolm was preparing for earthquakes in the Glades. Maybe he wasn’t entirely right in that. Maybe he wasn't wrong. But either way, he trusted you to do the right thing in the end. To make a difference. And he put you first. He always did. He was noble like that.’

‘Why do you even want me down here?’ Thea asks. ‘You loved him. They all told me. Why don’t you _blame_ me? Why would you want me here at all?’

Felicity pauses, catches the breath in her throat. She’s thought about it – those cruel, burning parts of her that lashed out at Thea in the early days and simmered down to a lingering resentment aimed mostly at Malcolm Merlyn as time went on. Oliver made a lot of mistakes – pushing her away was a big one, because she doesn’t think trading kisses in their quiet moments would have made her any more in love with him, or left her any more heartbroken in his wake – but he was more than his missteps. And Thea is too – she just doesn’t know it yet.

‘Because I loved him,’ she replies. ‘All of him. Even the stupid noble parts. And he loved you.’

The hacker turns away for a moment – strides over to Oliver’s workbench and it’s precisely laid out arrowheads. His bow – the compound beauty she helped to find for him when his recurve was broken in the Undertaking - sits exactly where they left it weeks ago, lonely. She takes it with careful hands – a weight she is familiar with but doesn’t trust between her own clumsy fingers – and steps back to Thea.

‘Let’s see if you can handle this,’ she says when she hands it over.

There is a weight that leaves her with the giving, and it isn’t just the bow. Thea holds it gingerly, runs her fingers along the bowstring and examines every inch. When she tests the weight she just manages a full draw. Felicity doesn’t mention the fact that the young archer is clearly close to tears. They have a city to clean up, and a month’s worth of damage to undo – and they only have the Flash on hand for a couple of hours.

‘Suit up, Speedy.’

Felicity returns to her computers and – finally – really gets back to work.


End file.
